OracleWorld Open conference with Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com Marc Benioff

If you are following the OracleWorld Open conference, you may get caught up in the little feud between CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.

It all started earlier this week with the new Oracle’s Exadata machine. Yes, Sun hardware. A "cloud in a box" analogy.

Salesforce.com users knows Benioff’s agenda with his keynotes. First, to evangelize his cloud computing message, and second, to promote his own products.

A day later at his keynote, he counterattacks Ellison’s message and rants about "clouds aren’t in a box" and joked repeatedly about how tall the “boxes” were. The other half of the presentation was focused on Chatter and mobile computing given by Kraig Swensrud.

A couple of cameo appearances by Dell helped them with their latest Streak mobile device.

All IT decision makers want is low costs, pay per use with no contract, great up time, iron clad security, and increased productivity.. and of course more sales and more profit. Think about your mobile device provider.

We’ll leave the definition of “cloud computing” to Webster.. or better yet, Gartner!